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Heart

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The mind is entangled in a futile pursuit to logically rearrange reality into something it can observe, control, and catalogue.

Poetry frees the mind of its entanglements, because it emanates from the heart, and I am not being literal in the sense of the physical heart, but in the sense as how the word is generally used, as the part of your being that comes from a state without thought but plenty of emotional content.

Very often we find ourselves feeling a poem. Why do we feel a poem, or the words of a poem, why not think them, or think of them?

Even when we find ourselves thinking of them ,we really only end up feeling them, or thinking of them because they connect us to a feeling.

Poetry is a way to express feeling, feelings that sometime cannot be summarized a logical or direct manner.

The heart is the seat where emotions flow and logic cannot flourish.

Yes, it is true that poetry can be logical, it can and does discuss real world problems and issues that people deal with on a day to day basis. It also can be very cerebral, and metaphysical, and build your intelligence through enhancing the more abstract analytical skills of the individual.

But that is the point, that poetry can speak to so many aspects of life, beyond just a logical means.

I am not implying that a type of gibberish poetry is acceptable, because if it is really gibberish, it is not poetry.

Poetry speaks to the reader in a way that transmits something special, a kind of knowledge and feeling, an experience, that does not necessarily have to be spelled out like prose.

Poetry elevates its readers, makes them an extension of the very poem they are reading.

There is something amazing that happens to a human being touched and transformed by poetry. The very influence of poetry represents something with great power.

Some writers who have been dead for many centuries still influence people with their poems, including poets like Rumi.

Poetry illuminates our lives, and like Khalil Gibran's The Prophet, it can open vistas of self observation that the reader did not know were there, and yet were just around the corner.

Poetry comes from the heart, because while the mind can at times be callous and cold and closed off to the world, the heart is open and true and can understand things without being cold and loveless.

Poetry is the heart of our species, and the flow and rhythm of the words represents the ebb and flow of life itself.

Learn more about this author, Thaxton Lewis.
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